INTRODUCTION:
To taste the full flavor of these stories you must bring an
orderly mind
to them, you must have a reasonable amount of confidence, if
not in what
used to be called the laws of nature, at least in the
currently
suspected habits of nature. If you believe in the ability
and
willingness of surgeons to transplant brains from skull to
skull with
shocking results, these stories may frighten you, but merely
in the same
way -- though hardly to the same extent -- that having to
take ether in
a strange hospital would frighten you. If you believe in
ghosts, you
can hope to derive from these stories at the very most a weak
semblance
of the sensation you would experience on being told there was
a
bogey-man in the closet, or on having the village cut-up
wrapped in a
sheet jump out of hiding at you. If you believe in
werewolves, then it
can make little difference to you, except perhaps
academically, whether
your heroine is eaten by one of them or shot down by a
Cicero
muscle-man. To the truly superstitious the "weird" has only
its Scotch
meaning: "Something which actually takes place."
The effectiveness of the sort of stories that we are here
concerned with
depends on the reader's believing that certain things cannot
happen and
on the writer's making him feel -- if not actually believe --
that they
can but should not happen. If the reader does not feel that
these things
have happened, or does not care whether they have happened,
then the
author has been, in the first case, unconvincing and, in the
second,
uninteresting, literary faults by no means confined to our
present
field, and so of no especial interest to us here. If the
reader feels
that it is nice for these things to have happened, or has no
positive
feeling that they should not have happened, then the story
is, for that
particular reader at least, fantasy and lies outside our
field.
This business of making the reader feel that what cannot
happen can and
should not is a tremendously difficult one for the author.
Addressing
himself, as we have assumed he must, to the orderly minded
reader, he
cannot count on any native credulity or superstition to be
taken
advantage of.
Atmosphere may be used to set the stage, but is seldom a
great help
thereafter and in fact more often an encumbrance than
not.
Brutality, often an excellent accompaniment and a means to an
end, is
never properly more than that in this field, and some of the
finest
effects have been secured with the daintiest touches. The
most
authentic single touch in "The Turn of the Screw" -- too well
known as
well as a bit too long for inclusion here -- is not when the
child sees
the ghost across the lake, but when she turns her back to it,
pretending
interest in some rubbish at her feet, to keep her governess
from knowing
she has seen it. One of my own favorites is that attributed,
I believe,
to Thomas Bailey Aldrich:
A woman is sitting along in a house. She knows she is
alone in the whole world: every other living thing is
dead. The doorbell rings.
That has, particularly, the restraint that is almost
invariably the mark
of the effective weird tale. Usually all the most skilled
author can
hope for are some shivers of apprehension as his reader feels
himself
led towards the thing that cannot happen and the culminant
shudder as he
feels that the cannot has become the should-not. This shudder
is almost
always momentary, almost never duplicated. Few weird stories
have run
successfully to any great length. The familiar exceptions are
those in
which considerable space was devoted to
groundwork. The high spot is when the cannot becomes the
should-not,
and whether this transition is accepted or rejected by the
reader, the
peak has been passed and the wise author rests.
--Dashiell Hammett
Happy New Year to all you Rara Avians.
--steve kesten
#
# To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to
majordomo@icomm.ca.
# The web pages for the list are at http://www.vex.net/~buff/rara-avis/.